Showing results for "The English" in Absurdist

Morgan Beale is a pop icon - and hates every second of it. He begins adapting the latest best seller, The Chihuahua in the Blue Prada Bag, into a blockbuster movie just before his celebutante wife starts remodeling their Hollywood home, driving Beale to a hotel. Dodging the paparazzi one morning on his way to Starbucks, he spots his writing partner, Luke, who has been dead for over a decade, and who is staring into a mysterious hole in the ground....

From John Elizabeth Stintzi, the mind that created the daringly bizarre novel My Volcano, comes an electrifying collection of strange and dark tales. In the surreal, often precarious realities of Bad Houses, a doctor discovers a double-edged cure for the Ebola virus, a college student loses a different body part each time they return home for the summer, Midas's hairdresser strives to keep his secrets, and a young girl develops a fascination with the trolls who harvest her father's pumpkin patch. At once humourous and horrifying, these stories will inevitably take residence in your mind.

The Hospital Ship is no more, and Yang Wei awakens to find himself at the mercy of monstrous doctors and the tumult of his own mind. Not helping matters, of course, is the Mars Hospital’s Pool of Dead Souls. A ghastly body of water, it traps people in an endless cycle of treatment, death, and resurrection. When an unruly band of patients revolts against this suffering, the Hospital descends into chaos, the likes of which have never been seen before.

Andrej is a postman in complete denial of his existence. He yearns for respect and fame but commits petty crimes for reasons he doesn’t fully comprehend. Josip is an increasingly irrelevant cable car operator and unfaithfully married. Life was so much simpler when neither one knew the other’s secrets. Now that they do - discovered quite by accident - each man has resorted to blackmailing the other. As their anonymous misdeeds escalate, a farce of mutual dependency begins. So does the unlikeliest of friendships when Andrej and Josip finally meet face-to-face.

One dark, windy supermoon night in the near future, a woman's ill-timed tarot question rips open a portal between dimensions, unleashing cosmic chaos. Step right up to Venice Peach, a flamboyantly freakish circus on the gritty Venice Beach boardwalk, where bizarre talents and mind-bending spectacles are just the beginning. Get lost in a funhouse maze of reality-shattering events and untamed, sex-fueled showdowns.

Obsessed by what they are certain is the impending apocalypse, a mismatched trio set off on a globetrotting road-trip in the latest feel-good adventure from the internationally bestselling author of The Hundred Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out of the Window and Disappeared. In the fading days of...

“Hilarious, refreshing, tightly plotted, and vividly written. An irresistible read.”—Jonas Jonasson, #1 New York Times bestselling author of The 100-Year-Old Man Who Climbed Out The Window And Disappeared “A seriously funny take on death and dying.” —Kirkus Reviews, starred review An...

From the critically acclaimed author of The Heap, a thought-provoking and wryly funny novel—equal parts satire and psychological thriller—that holds a funhouse mirror to the isolated workplace and an age of endless distraction. At the far reaches of the world, the Northern Institute sits in...

War on the mainland is draining Reykjavík. For some, the remote islands off Hrímland's coast are their only hope of survival. Elka, a recovering addict, has fled there with her son Sölvi. In their village they find a new life—all thanks to the Deep, a peculiar power their neighbours praise for the booming fishing industry. Everything seems perfect, but Sölvi does not trust the people who take his mother in.

The excoriating stories in Mark Doten's brilliant first collection dissect the pathological narratives that shape our culture and country. Narrated by a crosscutting array of White people, Doten's stories spotlight the self-serving logic through which their characters struggle to make sense of, and take control of, the narrative of our time.

Metamorphosis is a novella written by Franz Kafka, first published in 1915. One of Kafka's best-known works, Metamorphosis tells the story of salesman Gregor Samsa, who wakes one morning to find himself inexplicably transformed into a huge insect and subsequently struggles to adjust to this new condition. In popular culture and adaptations of the novella, the insect is commonly depicted as a cockroach.

A couple's cat leaves offerings of dead birds freighted with mysterious import. A foreign worker helps construct a concert hall that reawakens his musical longings. A young diver hunts venomous cone snails for a lovelorn researcher. With disarming simplicity, Barrie Sherwood charts how the...

Richard Brautigan's world is one of gentle magic and marvelous laughter, of the incredibly beautiful and the beautifully incredible. Trout Fishing in America is a pseudonym for the miraculous. A journey that begins at the foot of the Benjamin Franklin statue in San Francisco's Washington Square, that wanders through the wonders of America's rural waterways, and that ends, inevitably, with mayonnaise. Funny, wild, and sweet, Trout Fishing in America is an incomparable guidebook to the delights of exploration.

“As intellectually playful as the best of Thomas Pynchon and as sardonically warm as the best of Kurt Vonnegut, The Heap is both a hilarious send-up of life under late capitalism and a moving exploration of the peculiar loneliness of the early 21st century. A masterful and humane gem of a...

The Novices of Lerna introduces the enigmatic fictions of Ángel Bonomini to English listeners for the first time. Shot through with wry humor and tender absurdity, these meditations on identity, surveillance, and isolation remain eerily prescient. The collection's central novella follows Ramon Beltra, an unambitious scholar who receives a mysterious invitation to a lucrative six-month fellowship at the University of Lerna in Switzerland.

In seventy-two hours, a blockbuster expose will reveal Victoria Stevens's multibillion-dollar startup as a massive fraud. And Victoria has gone missing. Has she faked her death, leaving her husband, Guy Sarvananthan, to face the fallout—and potential jail time? Should Guy flee to his native Sri Lanka, an outcast and a failure? Or embrace denial? Opting for the latter, he takes the corporate jet to a private Caribbean island, where the 0.0001% have gathered to decide which one of the world's biggest problems to "eradicate forever."

The boy and the girl have been married for decades, mostly getting along as they go about their lives. But one day, like thousands of people around the world, the boy vanishes, and the girl is left to wait, wonder, and worry. Will he return? Who might she be if she moves on without him?

This laugh-out-loud novel, with its interwoven and inventive plotlines, could be called Game of Bones. In the midst of being ensnared in a devious revenge plot, Spike the Wonder Dog manages to unleash his celebrated brand of absurdist humor, shrewd social commentary, and certifiably funny grievances at human shortcomings, while romping through all manner of sexy scenarios in the rich and famous playgrounds of Palm Beach, Manhattan, and East Hampton.

A man with dark thoughts on his mind is racing along the remote snowy roads of Hurmevaara in Finland when there is flash in the sky and something crashes into the car. That something turns about to be a highly valuable meteorite. With euro signs lighting up the eyes of the locals, the unexpected treasure is temporarily placed in a neighbourhood museum, under the watchful eye of a priest named Joel.

Botanist Alfred Homer, ever hopeful and constantly surprised, is invited on a road trip by his parents’ friend, Professor Morgan Bruno, who wants company as he tries to unearth the story of the mysterious poet John Skennen. But this is no ordinary road trip. Alfred and the Professor encounter towns where Black residents speak only in sign language and towns that hold indigenous parades; it is a land of house burnings, werewolves, and witches.